The MacGuffin Effect
by Wintertime
Summary: A young Grissom searches for a body in the desert. What he finds is subsequently lost before the end, and what he was after is still missing.


THE MacGUFFIN EFFECT

SUMMARY: Grissom never belonged in the cast of _Stand By Me_. One summer, when he's fifteen, he goes looking for one dead body in the desert, and he finds another one.

DISCLAIMER: I don't own CSI or Grissom - - they belong to CBS.

NOTE: Support George and Jorja - - sign petitions, send letters. Let's do whatever it takes to make sure that the characters of Nick and Sara stay on the show.

- -

_. . .the device, the gimmick, if you will, or the papers the spies are after... The only thing that really matters is that in the picture, the plans, documents, or secrets must seem to be of vital importance to the characters. To me, the narrator, they're of no importance whatsoever._

- Alfred Hitchcock

- -

Gil had heard about the body, of course.

When there's big news in a small town like Fairing, it means that _everyone _hears about the bodies. Even the kid in the trashy house down the street with the deaf mother and the tattered madras shorts. The kid with the bug obsession and no friends. Stuff like that gets around, whether people want it to or not, but mostly they want it. They want it to fill the spaces in their lives when there is no longer any conversation that's not about Sue's new baby or how Travis went hitchhiking east for two days. Dead bodies, in Fairing, make good conversation. And even if no one talks to you - - like no one talked to Gil - - you could still listen. And hear.

The body was missing, that was the problem. Somewhere between Fairing and the coroner two towns over, the body had gone missing. There and then gone. People talked about Satan worshipers. Organ thieves. Hooligans with a pronounced taste for the macabre.

You live with a deaf person for so long, you start to realize that you can hear a lot. Gil collected the rumors and facts about the dead body like some people collected baseball cards. He alphabetized them in his head and then divided them into subcategories based on likelihood and the reliability of the source.

Gil had never seen a dead body before.

He was fifteen, awkwardly tall and awkwardly poor. He was also a genius in the reckoning of IQ tests and SATs, but Gil had his own way of judging genius and thought he came up short. He had a deaf mother and no friends. The town pariah - - at least of the local high school.

It wouldn't have surprised anyone that Gil wanted to see the body. They just would have taken it as a matter of course. It was the kind of weird thing that was expected of him.

On the hottest July morning of that year, he packed two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and some bottles of water in a grocery bag, grabbed his science textbook, and stuffed all of it into his canvas book-bag. The book-bag was falling apart at the seams, and showed the dark lines of new stitching to replace old cover-flaps that had ripped off last year.

He went into the kitchen. It smelled like lemonade and old wood.

"Can I go camping for the weekend?" he signed.

His mother looked tired. Her hands moved slowly - - slower than usual. "Looks like you're already packed, Gil."

"I like to be prepared."

She smiled at him. Her red hair was going gray one curl at a time. Gil knew she wanted a rinse to fix it up, but they didn't have the money. Her hands, with their chipped polish, crawled through speech.

"You want to go looking for that body, don't you?"

"You know me too well."

"I know my own son," she said. "You got that from your father, you know?"

He knew. Stories about his father were revealed in fractions, not wholes, but one of the things Gil was certain about was that Michael Grissom had been a funeral director. Gil had gotten the interest but not the social skills. He wanted to be a coroner. Doctor Gil.

His mother didn't wait for him to answer. She sipped her iced tea.

"Go on then, Gil. Be careful. It's dangerous out there."

Gil kissed her on the cheek. She touched his hand as he left. He looked at her tarnished wedding ring and nodded. He would be careful - - he had inherited her caution. Coupled with his father's morbidity, it made for an interesting combination - - life and death lay cheek-to-jowl in the gawky boy.

They didn't say that they loved each other. They never said that. But Gil didn't slam the screen door on his way out of the house, even though she wouldn't have heard it. One good slam was all that door had left inside it, and he couldn't have borne her looking at the splintered wood and going through her faded cloth pocketbook.

He loved with a bewildered kind of loyalty.

Gil walked through the dust surrounding the yard. He always wished for a climate - - or some trees. There were no shadows to hide him, just the stark desert. There was nothing to swallow him whole. His tennis shoes with the unbound rubber flap attracted pebbles and swept them up under his toes. Thank God for athletic socks, no matter how old. His feet still weren't sore.

"Hey, lookit the kid," someone said.

Gil stared at the ground. Dust sprayed over it. He created windstorms with each thudding foot.

"Who's that?"

"That freak. That freak with the deaf mom."

"You deaf, too, asshole?"

Gil looked up. Eye contact. The first boy was a few years older, with a scar twisting away from his mouth like a corkscrew. The other one had a thousand freckles on his nose alone, and the rest of his face was just as liberally sprayed. Gil wondered what defined a freak.

Freckles pushed into him like a breaker. Gil stepped back.

"I said you deaf too, asshole?"

"Selectively," Gil said.

"Selectively, what the hell?"

"Sometimes," Gil clarified. He looked around. There was sand. And more sand. Corkscrew was carrying a battered wooden bat, and his friend with the freckles was squeezing a baseball between his sausage-sized fingers. Gil normally liked baseball, but he didn't think these two were going to ask him to play. "When I don't want to hear what people are saying, I'm deaf."

"You smart-ass," Freckles said.

Sure.

Corkscrew seemed to be smarter than Freckles.

"Where you going, kid?"

Gil didn't really like "kid" any better than "asshole" or "freak", even though he guessed that it technically was. Corkscrew was also paying more attention to him than he liked. Those green eyes were fixated on him with an intensity that Gil recognized in his mother's eyes when she was paying bills, her tongue sliding over her lower lip. Corkscrew's eyes lacked the absent desperation, though.

He told the truth: "I'm going to go look for that body."

Freckles gaped at him. "Yeah? That one kid? That Blume kid?"

Gil hadn't heard the name of the missing corpse, but he nodded anyway. Freckles and Corkscrew didn't seem to be considering beating him up at the moment, they were both standing stock-still. Corkscrew was pursing his lips in a way that made the scar bunch up like a coiled spring, and Freckles was slapping his hands against his pockets in an unerring, frenetic non-rhythm.

"Nobody's found that thing yet," Corkscrew said.

"No," Gil said, "no one has."

If they had, he wouldn't have gone looking for it.

"Shit," Freckles said in a soft, awed voice. "You think anyone else is looking for it?"

Gil said, "Probably the police."

"Yeah, yeah, the cops," Corkscrew said. "Sure, the cops. But, I mean, come on. They lost it in the first place, why should they find it? Maybe we could find it."

Or maybe Gil could just keep looking for it and Freckles and Corkscrew could just keep playing baseball and waiting for another town pariah to come strolling along the road. And all would continue to be right with the world. Gil didn't need anyone on his side.

Corkscrew appraised him. "You're as weird as people say, kid." He sounded impressed.

"Okay," Gil said.

What other response was there to something like that?

Corkscrew offered his hand. It was large and dusty, with square fingertips and tan-lines around the knuckles and wrist. Gil could feel the calluses on his palm.

"I'm Sam," Corkscrew said. "Sam Fletcher. You're that kid. That Gil kid." He snapped his fingers with a loud smacking noise. "Grissom. Gil Grissom, right?"

"Yeah," Gil said, staring at his hand, still in Sam's firm grip.

Sam relinquished, and nudged Freckles with his foot. Freckles scowled. He didn't hold out his hand, but he said:

"Tiger," Freckles said.

Sam snorted. "That's not your name, asshole."

"Drop it, Sam," Tiger said. "This kid doesn't need my real name."

Tiger was probably better than Freckles, all things considered. Gil kept his mouth shut, and waited to see if Tiger would offer his hand. He didn't. Gil couldn't care less. He nodded at Tiger, who frowned back at him in response. And he had been so vocal just a few minutes ago.

"You mind some company, kid?"

There was no way these two were going to keep calling him "kid" and "asshole". Not if they were going to be together for hours.

"Gil," he said. "My name is _Gil_."

Sam nodded. "Sure. Gil. Can we come with you?"

Gil privately wondered how two seventeen-year-olds went from getting ready to beat him up to asking his permission to go look for a body. And he didn't even have enough sandwiches for three people - - although Tiger might not even come. He evaluated them both. Sam didn't look so bad - - after the sting of the teases had worn off, he looked contemplative. Intelligent. Not really too vindictive, either.

"Sure," Gil said. "If you want."

Sam grinned. "_Tiger _here has a car, don't you? We can drive. Save time."

"This little asshole's not riding in my car," Tiger said darkly. "No way. We'll walk."

"What crawled up your ass?"

"Come on, Sam, you don't want to hang out with this kid. Lookit him. He's that one kid, the loser. The creep with the bugs. What the hell? Now you're best friends? You wanna go look for a body with some freak like this?" Tiger glared at him. "Deaf mom, dead dad, house out here in the middle of the _fucking desert_. . ."

"This whole _town_," Gil said mildly, "is in the middle of the fucking desert."

"Kid's right," Sam said. "And he seems to know a hell of a lot more about where to find a body than you do."

Tiger shrugged, then said grudgingly, "Car's in the shop, anyway."

"Just say that, then," Sam said. "Fine. We'll walk."

And that was how Gil Grissom lost control of his own scientific experiment and made a sort-of friend. Sam Fletcher had straw-colored hair in addition to the corkscrew scar, and he had a denim jacket that he shrugged off a few miles into the silent walk. It dropped into the dust like a shriveled snake-skin. Gil wondered what it would be like to have so many possessions that you could just afford to leave them behind. Sam grinned at him.

"How old are you, anyway?" Sam asked, bouncing the baseball bat against his heel as they walked.

"Fifteen." The pebbles in his shoe rubbed against his instep. "Almost sixteen."

"I'm seventeen. You didn't ask."

"I could guess," Gil said dryly. "You're on the baseball team at East High."

"Sure. You like baseball?" Sam looked at him curiously, as if he'd never met anyone quite like Gil before. His question sounded earnest, interested.

"Yeah," Gil said. "My favorite sport."

Tiger was a different story. Tiger stayed in the foreground and scowled. Gil figured that Sam was probably the leader and Tiger was probably the unequivocal follower - - only Tiger didn't want to follow _Gil_. Tiger looked to be a little younger than Sam, with curl brown hair and those prominent freckles all over his face and the backs of his hands. His nose was flakily sunburnt.

"Tiger here plays football. You like football?"

"No," Gil said.

Sam looked smug. "Score one for my side."

"What, it's a contest now? See who the kid likes more?" Tiger kicked savagely at a rock and it skipped over the sand and collided again with the ground. "I don't give a shit." He opened his hand and let the baseball fall to the ground. It rolled behind them like a boulder, impervious to the heat. Gil looked back, but couldn't see where it stopped rolling.

"Is your mom really deaf?"

"She wasn't always." Gil remembered her playing music and moving his hands over the piano. Then the frustrated silence when she could no longer hear the sounds she was making. "It's a medical condition."

"That sucks, man."

Gil couldn't think of anything to say to that.

Sam evaluated his non-response. "Guess you know that, though."

Gil thought he probably did.

Tiger shoved him. "You can talk, asshole. Talk. I've had about enough of this no-talking bullshit." In the wavering white light, his eyes almost looked striped. His face, between the freckles, glowed red. Another shove. "Say _something_, dammit."

Gil opened his mouth and what came out was:

"The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain."

Sam laughed.

Tiger shoved Gil so hard that he sat down on the sand. His ass ached from the rough collision.

"What's this shit?" Tiger asked. "The rain in Spain?"

"The life of the wife is ended by the knife," Gil continued. "Unique New York. Peter Piper picked a pint of pickled peppers. She sells seashells by the seashore. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if woodchuck could chuck wood?" He stood up, brushing dust off his shorts. He looked at Tiger. "Oh, and Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean."

Tiger pushed into him again, palms of his hands flat against Gil's chest. Gil leaned forward instead of backward, breaking Tiger's shove. Tiger stumbled.

Sam stepped between them.

"Cool it," he said to Tiger. "He's just a kid."

"He's tall as you and _you _were on him before."

"Yeah, well, quit it _anyway_, okay?" Sam turned to Gil. "You okay?"

Gil would've been better if Sam had maybe stepped in before most of the shoving had already ended, but he nodded, shutting his mouth again. He'd run out of tongue-twisters and verbal teases anyway. He let Sam lift his hands from his shoulders, and Gil walked ahead of them on the rusty-colored hardpan.

He thought that they might turn around, walk away, and leave him alone, but then he heard the footsteps behind him - - one set (Sam) and then, slowly, heavily, another (Tiger).

He drifted backwards towards Sam. He didn't know if he was relieved or not.

- -

The sun was setting, and it was starting to get cold. All the things he'd thought of, and he hadn't thought of that. He wished Sam hadn't thrown the denim jacket aside when they started out. His feet ached and the pebbles were finally nipping through the cotton of his socks. He could have held out without saying anything about his feet if it hadn't been cold, and could've gone on in the cold if it hadn't been for his feet.

As is, he said, "Let's stop here."

Tiger had been sullenly quiet for the whole walk. Now he said, "Tired?" with an ugly leer.

"Yeah," Gil said simply, and sat down. The sand was cool through the madras shorts. Sam dropped down beside him, his long legs sprawled out into the darkness in their denim cloth.

"Your mom know you're gone?"

"I told her." Gil looked at him suddenly. Sam's face was a pale moon. "Do _your _parents know?"

"No. They won't care."

"But you're missing."

He had maybe talked more today than he'd talked in the last few weeks put together. With his mother, conversation was in the dance of fingers, and summer was empty of school and even tentative companionship. Even if there had been school, he was _always _quiet.

Sam shrugged. "Yeah, I am. But they won't get worried. They'll just think I went camping or something."

"Your parents?" Tiger said flatly. He was still standing.

"Yeah."

Tiger nodded, and finally collapsed on the sand beside Sam. They were crushed by the darkness. Gil suddenly thought that they might be making a mistake. Violence was practically nonexistent in Fairing - - even the body they were looking for had died of an accident instead of a murder - - but still, three boys against the total black of the desert seemed defeating . . . frightening.

He said nothing. He ate his sandwich, and, after a brief consideration, offered the other one to Sam.

Sam took it. "Peanut butter?"

Gil nodded, realized he couldn't be seen, and said, "Yes."

Sam bit into it wonderingly. "Why didn't I think to bring any food?" His words were mumbled due to the thickness of peanut butter and jelly in his mouth, his teeth. Gil passed him a water, and Sam's lips clamped over it and drank deeply, his Adam's apple moving up and down, reflecting off the plastic bottle.

Tiger said, quietly, "I'm hungry."

Sam looked at Gil, but Gil didn't have an answer. With a sigh, Sam tore his own sandwich in half and handed the wilting triangle over to Tiger.

Gil swallowed another bite of sandwich, chased it down with lukewarm water, and wondered if he should really let other people be doing his sacrificing for him.

He liked Sam - - he was beginning to distantly realize this. Sam had a kind of solidity that the rest of Gil's life was missing. Sam didn't seem to care about the endless tango between bills and paychecks. Sam just wanted to play baseball and find a dead body. Eat a sandwich and lie flat on his back on the billowing sand. It wasn't up to Gil to ask why Sam's parents wouldn't worry - - it could have been an age thing, anyway. Maybe when kids were seventeen, their parents never cared. He liked Sam despite Sam's initial tease and shove, because Sam seemed more contemplative away from Fairing, as if all of that stuff about Gil being poor and a freak had dwindled away like the sight of the town.

He liked Sam. He didn't need Sam to give up anything for him.

But he wouldn't give something up for Tiger, who had carried Fairing with him into the desert, clamped on his shoulders like an unnecessary burden, something far heavier than Sam's bat, which rested beside them on the ground, taped for grip on one end and splintery on the other. Tiger seemed petulant and cruel and useless, and Gil wasn't giving up half his sandwich to someone who was already breathing too much air anyway.

Gil didn't want to be selfish, but he thought he might be anyway. He wasn't used to caring about anyone but himself and his mother. He didn't want to hate Tiger, either, but he did anyway.

"Somebody should stay up," Sam said. "You two sleep right now."

Gil nodded and let himself down on the sand. It was uncomfortable. He wiggled his shoes off and flattened his toes against the ground. He heard Tiger settle down on Sam's other side.

There was a sliding sound as Sam dragged the bat into his hands and across his legs. A whisper of wood over denim. Quiet, indistinct.

Gil closed his eyes.

- -

The morning was all about silence.

No one said anything about the lack of food.

No one said anything about the dwindling supply of water.

No one said anything about turning back.

No one said anything because talking would make their mouths drier, and besides, Tiger didn't want to talk to Gil, and Gil didn't want to talk to Tiger, and Sam couldn't hold two conversations at once. So they were silent, except for the swishing sound of Sam's bat swinging back and forth like a pendulum as they walked. Tiger scowled, and Gil stared at the ground, and Sam occasionally looked at one of them and sighed.

Tiger broke the silene first. "I'm still hungry."

Gil dug through his backpack again and came up with a messy package of cookies. He hadn't even packed them - - they must have been something his mother left in as a surprise. He threw them at Tiger, who missed the toss. They rolled into the dirt.

Sam split them up. Two chocolate-chip cookies each, with an extra half for Gil.

"Since they're yours, and everything," Sam said, licking chocolate off his lower lip.

Gil squished cookie crumbs in his mouth. The taste was sickly-sweet. He didn't even like cookies, but anything tasted better than the dust between his teeth.

Tiger threw the plastic bag away from them.

"Plastic doesn't degrade easily," Gil observed, almost by rote, and sipped his water. It was a little over halfway gone. He stood, retrieved the bag, and stuffed it back in with the science textbook.

Sam looked, and snorted. "You carry around a science textbook?"

"I didn't know anyone else was going to be here," Gil said. "I might have needed something to read to keep me up at night." He drew the bag closed.

"Yeah - - but . . . a _science _book?"

"I like science."

"Yeah," Tiger sneered. "You're the bug-kid. I heard you have a praying mantis farm back at that shitty little house of yours. True?"

"No," Gil said calmly, "they're cockroaches. Not mantises. Having a farm of mantises isn't a good idea, since they kill each other right after they breed. Cockroaches aren't as violent."

"I've never seen someone who didn't freak over roaches," Sam said, interested. "How many do you have?"

Gil shrugged. "A couple hundred. I've never counted."

"What do you feed them?"

"Dog-food," Gil said simply.

They started walking again. Their footsteps shuffled in the sand.

Tiger pulled the bat out of Sam's hands and began to swing it through his grip in a circle, the tip revolving over the ground like a bizarre divining rod, searching for water. Gil didn't like the way he looked at it, and he began to lag behind the older boys, allowing his steps to drag so that he could keep an eye on Tiger. Sam dropped back, then, and let Tiger lead. Tiger didn't look back at them. His boots were silvery with dust.

"You're scared of him," Sam said.

"No."

"You should be. He hates you."

"I know."

"And you hate him back, right?"

"Well," Gil said, "no one's perfect."

Sam looked like he might be disappointed, but he just nodded.

"Where'd you get that scar?" Gil asked, curiosity finally getting the better of him. The corkscrew scar twisting away in a coil from Sam's mouth was reddish in the new morning light. Sam's fingers glided over it.

"Barbed wire," Sam said. "When I was a kid. I thought it was candy. Good thing I figured it out before I got it into my mouth. It was really a little cut - - it stretched when I grew up."

"I once tried to drink ammonia."

"You're starting to talk more," Sam said.

Gil sighed. "I talk sometimes."

"Okay. Sure. Can you do that sign language stuff for me?"

Gil did that sign language stuff for him.

Sam watched, fascinated. "You're something else, kid."

"Gil," he said.

Sam nodded. "Right. Sorry. So why did you try to drink ammonia?"

"I thought it was soda. My mom got me away from it. Sent me to my room and kept me there all night. What did they do when they found out you tried to eat barbed wire?"

"Took me to the hospital," Sam said shortly. "Got stitches."

"That's it?"

"Yeah." Sam looked at the ground. "You don't have to talk anymore."

He hadn't been talking for Sam's benefit, but he shut up anyway. Gil could tell when people wanted to be left alone, and Sam kept touching the scar at the corner of his mouth and staring at the hardpan in front of them. Soon Gil was watching Sam's footprints be swept away as he lagged further behind the other two.

Maybe Sam had wanted someone to punish him. Maybe stitches weren't enough.

Gil didn't understand people, not even people that he liked.

He watched Tiger's back. Tiger was stockier than Sam, and he moved with a kind of deliberate intensity, leaning forward as if fighting through a strong wind. Sam had long legs and every step made it seem like he was bicycling. Gil lagged behind him, and he didn't know how he was walking because he had never been good at seeing himself.

- -

By two o'clock, when they hadn't found the body, Tiger said:

"Let's turn around, go back."

Gil said nothing. Sam just looked at him.

"You going to turn around?" he asked quietly, and Gil shook his head.

"Screw it," Sam said. "I won't, then. Come on. We'll get there when we get there, even if we die trying. Or something." He took a few steps. Gil followed him; Tiger didn't. Sam turned around. "Come on," he said again.

"I'm not going anymore," Tiger said flatly. "I'm not following you and this little shit into the middle of nowhere to look for some dead body that they've probably found by now." He held up the bat. In Sam's hands, it had looked benign - - a sports tool, or something to protect. In Tiger's hands, it was a weapon - - deadly and hard wood. "We give up on this body or I start making new ones."

"You're crazy," Sam said.

Tiger held the bat like he was getting ready to make a swing. The friction tape was firm under his hands. Gil closed his eyes and retreated - - not physically, but mentally - - as if he could gain distance from Tiger by reciting the periodic table, the multiplication table. Metric measurements. The speed of light, the speed of sound, the names of state capitals, country capitals. Counties in Nevada. He stood there, eyes closed and muttering to himself as his lips moved in vague, indefinite patterns, shaping these things scientific and unchangeable, as if praying to make Tiger drop the bat and gain whatever sanity he had lost over the march.

He was praying in this way when Sam tried to grab the bat.

Tiger swung.

The wood cracked against Sam's arm with a thud. Wood against flesh. Gil heard the noise and then heard Sam scream. Then Tiger was screaming, to drown Sam out, and then Gil thought that he might be screaming, because Sam had dropped down on his knees in front of Tiger like a supplicant, and Tiger kept swinging like he was trying out for the Majors, swinging and swinging, and the sounds of flesh and wood were loud, even in the empty space of the desert. Swing. Swing.

Screaming.

Blood sprayed against Gil's cheek, his mouth. His lips were warm and wet with Sam's blood.

Tiger raised the bat again like a marionette with arms pulled straight above his head, and then swung it down vertically to _crack _against the crown of Sam's head.

Sam Fletcher was staring upwards when the bat hit. Gil saw the blood fall into his eyes. Splinters exploded into the air like a cloud of sawdust.

Sam's eyes turned towards Gil as he fell backwards. Gil noticed, for the first time, that they were green. The pupils were dilating rapidly, and his mouth opened to form shapeless syllables. Gil dropped down beside him. His barrier of periodic tables and mathematics had vanished. Eradicated. He leaned over Sam, Sam's blood running down from Gil's chin to spatter against Sam's face.

The corkscrew scar had vanished, replaced by a shattered jawbone. Sam's eyes were glazing over.

Gil had never had a friend before, and now the only one he'd gained was dying.

"I didn't do anything," Gil said. "I'm sorry."

Sam couldn't say anything. Couldn't even nod. Gil didn't even know if Sam had heard him. If it had been Gil dying, he would've heard Sam, or been able to read Sam's lips. Benefits of a deaf mother who hadn't been able to afford surgery. You learned how to read lips with her. The intricacies of tongue and lip and teeth flayed open; revealed. Speech was not a mystery to Gil, only knowing what to say.

He hadn't done anything. He'd just stood there. He'd retreated; hadn't tried to help. He had stood there and screamed like the kid Tiger said he was while Sam died.

Freak. Asshole. Kid. Shit.

He was not the great scientist, he was not the genius, he wasn't even a nice guy. He was the one who had let Sam do his sacrificing for him, when it came to little things like sandwiches and big things like lives.

Sam died right in front of him.

Gil didn't even cry.

It was Tiger who said something first. "Oh."

Just that. Just "oh". A single round vowel falling out of his mouth while he held the bat soaked with Sam's blood and stared at Gil, still bent over Sam's body and not crying, and hating himself for not crying.

"What did I do?"

"You killed him," Gil said flatly. "You _killed _him. _Him_."

Not Gil; Sam. Sam had been the one thing keeping Tiger from killing _Gil_, and now Sam was dead.

They had gone looking for a body, but the one they found wasn't the one they were after. It wasn't the Blume kid, lost on the way to the coroner's, it was just - - Sam. Sam Fletcher, who had shoved him and then saved him, been a follower and then a leader. Sam, who might have been his friend when Gil started high school once the summer ended - - and now:

"I didn't mean to," Tiger said, and to Gil, it didn't matter. It was such a ridiculous excuse, such a horrible non-motive.

"You hit him so many times," Gil said. He couldn't pick out an emotion from his voice. "You just kept hitting him."

"This is _your _fault. He was my friend." Tiger dropped the bat on the ground. "We were following you. You took us out here. He didn't turn around because of you. You didn't even help him."

Gil accepted the guilt, like a good Catholic, but he couldn't accept the blame.

He stood there and stared at Tiger, and then gestured to the bat on the ground. It had rolled towards Sam's body, the friction-taped handle tapping against Sam's arm. Sam wasn't going to play baseball again, that was for sure.

"Are you going to kill me, too?"

Tiger opened his mouth to reply, then clamped it shut. He shook his head.

"Good," Gil said.

He didn't touch the body and he didn't look at Tiger. He looked towards the horizon and started walking until his feet were on asphalt instead of sand, and then he sat down by the side of the road. He hugged his knees to his chest, and tucked his chin under them, staring out for passing cars. After a moment, Tiger came and dropped down beside him. They didn't say anything.

After a while, someone stopped to ask them what was wrong.

- end -


End file.
